Even the Big Guys Get It Wrong
Talking of poor "usability" I am reminded of an experience I had with eBay.co.uk last week. I owed them some fees for the things I'd sold recently. There was an option to pay it by Direct Debit so I thought that would be easiest in the long run. Part of the form I had to fill in looked like this:
I filled in all the fields and left England as England, thinking to myself how clever it was to know I lived in England and not Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. When I submitted the form I was surprised to see an error telling me I needed to select the county. What I had done was skim the form and not read the labels properly. I do this on almost all web pages - guessing what goes where and blindly entering text. This is part my fault but in this case I think it's badly thought out. The words county and country are too alike to allow confusion between them. If I had dropped down the select box, highlighted above, I would have seen that --England-- was a section of counties in this country and was itself an illegal choice. Not the normal way it's done. Isn't it more normal to see a simple text box for county, followed by a select box for the country?!
The worst part of it all was that it didn't use JavaScript to alert me of my "error". It let the form submit and then told me. It didn't present the form for me again so I could rectify the mistake; I had to use the back button and enter all the information again. To make matters worse, when I had finally completed everything, it simply gave me a form, with my information in the right places, for me to print out, sign and snail-mail them! I should have known you couldn't apply for Direct Debit online. In the end I swore at my monitor and used my credit card instead...
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What annoys me is that some sites don't list London as a County and insist that you add a county. Well duh! I live in London. Normally you'd find at least Greater London as a county. And to make matter worse, some list Middlesex... which technically no longer exists. Ah well.
Although a full address is not stricly necessary. Everybody knows that the standard layout for postcodes is XXNN NXX - but did you realise that there are in fact two extra digits which uniquely identify the house/flat/garden shed(delete as applicable) where you live? It is possible to send something through the mail with just the XXNN NXX NX entry as the address. It works. I've tested it. The fact that it's not very user friendly, doesn't mean it's not efficient in this day and age of automated sorting. Gave the postie a bit of a headache for the delivery though!
It's good to see England in the list.. I hate having to select United Kingdom.
One of the guys I work with lives in a little village in Cornwall. He doesn't have a "street name", yet many websites which require addresses require him to fill it in, and it annoys him no end, with him usually cancelling/ no completing his order from the offending company.
The best one was BT. He filled his street name in as "I don't have one you turds, this interface is sh*t!"
A few weeks later he duly received a letter addressed to him :
Mr. XXXX XXXXXXX
HIS HOUSE NAME
I don't have one you turds, this interface is sh*t!
HIS VILLAGE
Cornwall
"Automatic sorting" Dragon? Did you see Dispatches' undercover report at the Royal Mail the other week?
I still get letters from places I've filled in web-forms that look like this: {Link}
You would think ebay would make it as easy as possible to take your money!
I would have preferred a "--Select a county--" default option in the County field. I agree the form is badly designed.
Yes I saw Dispatches. But the Wimbledon sorting office has an automated machine. It reads the "invisible" dots or bar codes printed on the front and drops the envelopes into the respective sorting areas. Then it's up to the postie to select the right slot. It's printed right in front of them. Of course this assumes that the sorter can read. (^_^)
The only problem is with the delivery postie. He needs to know which codes apply to which houses. Fortunately my postie is very good.
Odd country you have there. Here in Canada, postal codes don't span counties or districts, so we can look up a county/district when necessary from a postal code. It must be tough on the Posties if the same code can be found in, say, Yorkshire and Cornwall.
Well that started a rush. I've just had two emails asking about how to find out the extra two digits. So if Jake doesn't mind I'll post how here.
I was doing some work linking Capscan's postcoding software into Domino when I found out about this unknown stuff. You can find your own extra two digits by using their online test page {Link}
Personally I think their product is pretty damn good. It's not so easy to link it into Domino but if anybody wants somebody who's been there and done that. I'm always available. (^_^)
Stan, our postcodes are unique across the UK.
I can totally understand your frustration. I was mind-boggled this morning when I was running out the door to work and saw my girlfriends younger brother go to his university site, download a standard form in Word format, fill it in and then print it out to take with him to uni. He told that this was very common.
All I can say is bags not being the administration staffer whos delightful job it is to type all of these documents into a database!
This post was brought to you by the words: trees! inefficiency and backward.
In Turkey postal codes have past of two decades. They start with two digists of the county, then 3 digits more for a particular district and the county code is same as county's traffic code.
The counties are at first 67, then the politicians decided to divide some counties, and the number reached to 81. At that point a problem arouse, as Istanbul's Anatolian side was given 81 already. So they switched all code from 81xxx to 34yyy. Ours old one was 81490 and I still cannot memorize the new one, sometimes I write the new one when asked, but most of the time I write the old one as I kind of anarchist act. If one was not intelligent to take into account that one day counties can be divided, and codes might be absolute...
Anyway still none of my mail is lost.
Actually it is a small chance as when one sees 81, they will still put it at Istanbul - Anatolian bucket, as Istanbul Anatolian side's population about 4 million whereas Duzce population (81's new owner) is roughly 50.000 not more I think.
IIRC, UK postcodes are unique for between 6-9 addresses, each then identifed by housenumber. For example, I used to give contact details as:
email: My.Name@There.com
post: My.Name@22.XX99XX
You could add .uk to the bottom for international compliance. But I am usually into Zenning things out...
I mean you could change you name by deed poll to a single character to make things even neater. But pick one we all can type, not like Prince. He had to issue a disk with the symbol on it to all and sundry just to get his name right.
Although, with a unique symbol as a name, I guess he didn't need to bother with an address. They just lashed it all over to Paisley Park I suppose.
Sorry. I'll get my coat.
I would have thought that the intended humour would have come across in my post, but I've been wrong before and shall be again. My point was that,if they've got your post code they shouldn't need you to enter a county value as well, especially if the validation is server-side where they could as easily have done the lookup.
And no, I don't feel the need to justify my decision to substitute a comma for a space in the post above. I just felt like it. So there.
Exactly Stanley - why bother with all that county palaver when the postcode and house number does the job perfectly well?
My dad always makes me laugh. He's 70 and hates filling in forms. My favourite line of his?
"What do they want to know my f*cking address for? They *posted* the f*cking form to me!"